<nettime> INDIA: Critical Success Factors for Rural ICT Projects in India

[Frederick FN Noronha àààààààà àààààààà *ÙØÙØØÙÙ ÙÙØÙÙÙØ <fredericknoronha@gmail.com>]

Critical Success Factors for Rural ICT Projects in India:
A study of n-Logue kiosk projects at Pabal and Baramati Project
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Management
By Vivek Dhawan

ABSTRACT

In the  past few years, the  power of Internet as a  communication medium
has
captured the imagination of developmental organizations around the world. A
number of projects have been undertaken in  various parts  of the world
attempting to provide sustainable digital access to rural communities.
India
boasts a maximum  number of such  projects. There is an urgent need to study
these projects for critical factors for sustainability, scalability and
impact of these
projects.
This particular study entails the study of rural  internet project of
 n-Logue
Communications Pvt Ltd at its sites in the Pune District of Maharashtra. The
study  focuses on the business model of n-Logue, which involves a Local
Service
Partner at the region-level and an entrepreneur  at the village level  to
run an
information kiosk. The infrastructure and nature  of services provided at
the
kiosks, usage charges, user profiles etc have been studied. It was found
that the
major revenue generating  services  are: Computer education, Kundli,
Photography and Internet, in that order. Also a number of factors affect the
kiosk
business: kiosk  operator profile and personality, location of  the kiosk,
demographic factors, services etc.
As part of the project, an evaluation  of usage and impact of agricultural
consultancy through aAQUA  was made. aAQUA ('a'lmost 'A'll 'QU'estions
'A'nswered) is an online expert Question & Answer based  community forum,
developed by Media Labs Asia, KReSIT, IIT Bombay, for delivering information
to
the grass roots of the Indian Community. It  is an online, multilingual,
multimedia, archived discussion forum accessible using a web browser,
allowing
members  to create, view  and manage  content in their  mother tongue
(Hindi,
Marathi etc). aAQUA has cyber extended the reach of experts at KVK, Baramati
and has demonstrated great potential for local content creation. However
aAQUA
suffers from the following limitations: slow rate of content creation and
absence
of commercial benefit for the kiosk operator in the present model. Scaling
up of
aAQUA would require linking up with a greater number of experts and a
commercial model at the kiosk level.

http://www.dil.iitb.ac.in/docs/kiosk-success-factors.pdf

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